Prose mesurée in the Lakes tour and guide: quoting and recalibrating English blank verse

Abstract

In this paper I consider Wordsworth’s blank verse and Lake District tours and guides in the context of debates about meter. Neo‐classical critiques had cast blank verse as a visual trick of the typographical page: as prose posing as verse by appearing in lines. In this paper I argue that the transformed textual conditions made possible by an expanded print culture contributed to the Romantic revaluation of the blank‐verse measure and the valorization of its lyric form. In effect, blank verse’s visual aspects were naturalized and nationalized. I isolate a particular kind of Romantic‐era page on which blank verses frequently appeared, that of the tour and guidebook, exploring the effects of this print format on the verse. Tours and guidebooks celebrated visual features of specifically English landscapes and quoted national poets to do so. In works published between 1774 and 1835, Gilpin, Hutchinson, Housman, and Wordsworth supplemented landscapes plotted in prose with extracts from Paradise Lost, Night Thoughts, The Seasons, Mason’s English Garden, and, in Wordsworth’s case, his own unpublished manuscripts. The guides cast blank‐verse excerpts both as agents of affective finish and visual coherence and as national textual heritage that illuminated Britain’s native forms and contours. Wordsworth’s Guide through the District of the Lakes formalized blank‐verse lyric by making salient its more minute graphic lines of emphasis and aligning these with nature’s marks in land and sky.